Final Year Project

During this week I made sure that once I had the core foundations of my game in place that I created a very basic user interface so that I can give people that will be play testing a sense of what is going on and what they are doing, because I finished my timer and lap counter last week I have decided to show off these first within my interface. Every time the player goes around the map and completes a lap there is a little counter in the bottom left of the screen that will show the player what lap out of three that they are currently on. As well as this i have also created a main menu for the player that displays the gold, silver and bronze times as well as the best achieved time from players that have played the project. This is important because the player needs to know the times to beat before being dropped straight into the race and not giving them much chance to see their targets. This week i have also settled on a map route that i am going to try and replicate, wi...

This week i have been working more on the foundations of my game, i realised that i had been spending a lot of time working on my player controller and tweaking small changes instead of going ahead and making a win lose value for the game. My game play loop is to complete 3 laps within the gold, silver and bronze times and pass through all the checkpoints to register your progress. The first thing i had needed to get done was a checkpoint system that would continuously spawn the next checkpoint available to the player as well as turning off the previous checkpoint, i needed this system in the game as soon as possible because as soon as i get them in the player will be notified in the tracks direction and will feel more inclined to drive through the set path than to ignore them and drive round in the wrong direction. i have shown my blueprinting and scripting below to see how i have achieved this system. the checkpoints are all stored in an array within this blueprint this is going to...

During this week i was primarily working on my progress review for my project, this is a short slide show of just a few pages that i will also be presenting , within this project review will be an explanation to what i have been working on for the past few weeks in detail and showing off blueprints and my scripting methods. One of the main sections to this presentation was an update on my project deliverable's this explains the changes that i have made to my deliverable since the proposal in the first week of the project. The main thing that i have changed since then has been the AI, i have decided to not go ahead with with enemy characters on the road as i feel like i wont have enough time to get the blueprints to a consistent polished standard like the rest of my project, as well as this i have worked on AI in the past but this has always been third and first person, and after doing research for my project i have found that racing AI is very difficult to get working in the fir...

When i was in the research phase of my development a game that i looked into for inspiration was Wipe-out, This was mainly for the camera movement and swing as i think it works well with physics based vehicles and adds a nice amount of visual feedback to the player as well. I also feel like the camera game is very important to racing games as they need to be smooth and show off as much of the environment as they can so that the player knows where about they need to be driving next and have the ability to dodge obstacles as well. When setting the camera up i decided that the ideal way to achieve the camera movement that i wanted was to add the default camera to a spring arm, that way the camera would rotate around the player rather than world space. Once i had added the spring arm i made sure that i am only inheriting the Yaw camera input and no the pawn control rotation as well, I then added a small amount of camera lag as well and rotation lag as well as it adds a bit of flare to...

This week i decided to go ahead and test my vehicle controller to see if there was anything i could notice that would need fixing or changing slightly. Whilst i was testing my movement and going around corners and sharp turns with my vehicle i realised that it had little to no traction at all, this meant that when the vehicle was turning it would drift around the centre of gravity. Now this type of traction would work well for a drifting mechanic if i decided to go ahead with one in the future but for the mean time its an annoyance just for regular acceleration. I started by making a script that would recognise which direction the player was moving in such as left and right this was a critical script as i needed to know if there was too much force added to one side of the vehicle or not enough on the other. After testing this script it would give me -0 if i was moving left and +1 if i was moving right, this way i knew which side the problem occurred. From there i then added one...

The first bug that i had ran into was that whenever the vehicle controller would crash into any other static object the front end of the car would rise up and allow the player to accelerate into the sky and this broke the game. This bug needed fixing as soon as possible and that's why i had set out to try and get it fixed by the end of the week. I tackled the problem by creating my own auto orientation blueprint that would send a ray-cast down from the player controller making sure that it is always going to cling to a surface making it harder to go off the road or bug out. As well as that just as an extra precaution i made another bit of scrip that would always auto orientate the players mesh back to its default rotation, this meant that when the player gets knocked by another player or crashes they will stabilise and go back to normal. After i had tried and tested the player controller i can see that it has fixed it for the time being, I will keep testing it for the tim...

The first thing that i had done was created the boost as it is an essential in kart racers this was done the same way the regular acceleration was created but this time rather than setting force i added force, this would then take the maximum force of the vehicle and then add more on top to add a boost. I then added the camera rotation by moving my spring arms yaw on a clamp so that the spring arm would only rotate around the character 90 degrees both ways so that the player cant just spin the camera around in a circle. I then found an issue where the camera could spin even when the character was moving and it would effect the steering. I found a solution for this and it was fairly straight forward all i did was add a rotator to the spring arm only and this has seemed to fixed the issue. For the rest of the week i decided to add a few smaller things into the player controller that wouldn't effect the game play but that are in most other kart racers, these are things such ...